Sunday, February 10, 2013

It’s not just the State that needs to say sorry to Magdalene survivors (Opinion)

NOW we know the State’s share of the blame for the slavery of our women in the Magdalene laundries.

We
know more than a quarter of the women were sent there by agents of the
State.

We know agents of the State, including the President, ate their
dinners off tablecloths had washed by Magdalenes and dried their mouths
with napkins they had starched.

Of course the Taoiseach should
admit as much and say “sorry”.

But when eventually that full apology
and compensation come we will still be left with a huge feeling of
disquiet.

Because the truth is — as Martin McAleese’s report makes clear
— it was our society which confined those women in those laundries.

And it is clear that some of the women could have been better off in
those appalling conditions than they would have been outside them.

There
were no women’s refuges then, few social services, no lone parents’
benefit. Some of the homes the women came from were cruel and dangerous.
“We were robbed of our childhood, but then I had a mother who beat the
crap out of me,” one woman told Mc Aleese’s committee.

Another told them
she had ended up in the laundry as a safety measure because her father
“interfered with the bigger girls”. You wouldn’t want to get “big” in
the family, would you?

After this report, we may finally move
away now from our habit of blaming the Catholic Church for everything we
have done wrong as a society.

The first Catholic Magdalene Asylum
opened in Peacock Lane, Cork, in 1809, a full half-century after the
first Protestant one, which opened in Leeson Street, Dublin, in 1765.

The Leeson Street home’s successor was the Bethany Home which was
established in Rathgar in 1922. Boston-based academic James Smith has
found four cases of Protestant women being sent there by the courts.

Bethany didn’t run a laundry – there were no nuns to manage one — but it
farmed out to work in slave-like conditions and some of these women are
still with us, looking in vain for recognition and redress.

The reason it is important to recognise the mirror image of the
Protestant response to the issue of “troubling” women is because it
makes clear that this was the response of the whole society, not of one
religion.

Our society produced the religious organisations.
There’s a very telling moment in McAleese’s report when a nun says, “We
were institutionalised too, of course.” The nuns were Irishwomen from
Irish homes. Most of them probably better off than the women they called
“penitents”. But some may have been escaping their own horrors and
their opportunities outside their orders were limited.

And the
“auxiliaries” who opted to stay in the laundries for life to “help” run
the laundries?

They are the scariest figures in the whole report. One
woman was beaten up by two of them on her first day, and she noticed the
other girls who entered that day had the same bruises.

Who
were these women, whose opportunities for love and family and career
were so limited that they opted to stay in the laundry? What kind of
society created that vacuum?

In Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries
and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, James Smith argues that we
did it because we had just been through a period of Civil War and
wanted to present an image of Irishness which was both “pure” and
uncomplicated: comely maidens and athletic youths.

I think
that’s a man’s reading of it. As a woman who has gone through pregnancy
and childbirth in Ireland, I think it all goes much deeper. We
incarcerated women because we were terrified of female sexuality.

We
incarcerated pretty girls, girls who had babies out of wedlock, girls
who had been abused by their relations.

What’s more,
McAleese’s report gives the lie to the idea that women did not send
women to the laundries. There are terrible stories here of mothers.

One
responded to her daughter’s plea for freedom with the request that she
be kept in for another 20 years.

These were women who, on some
level, hated women. They must have hated themselves. Perhaps their
daughter’s dawning sexuality reminded them of what their sexuality had
cost them: unwanted sex, unwanted pregnancy or even rape or abuse.

Perhaps they saw in their daughter’s bright eyes the hope which had
been dimmed in theirs. So they put it out of sight. Most of all, surely,
they feared their daughters’ wombs which could so easily bring shame on
the family.

And surely that fear went back to a chronic fear of having
another mouth to feed which went back to the Famine.

While
descriptions of the Irish before the Famine give the impression of a
free and easy people noted for their fertility, in the middle years of
the last century the Irish came as close as they could to stopping
having babies.

They were described as “The Vanishing Irish” by John
O’Brien in a famous pamphlet in 1952.

Well, we’ve certainly
moved on from there. Yet again last year we had the highest fertility in
Europe, a trend which began when our economy started to take off.

BUT someone like me, born in the 1960s, who always had contraception
and equal pay, experienced the fear of female sexuality like a
vice-grip. I received the message that having a baby would end my life.
That what mattered was to do brilliantly in the Leaving Certificate and
then thunder through my career.

If I had to have a baby I was
to breastfeed for as little time as possible. I was to beat down that
overwhelming need to be with my baby and get the hell back to work where
I was to act as if my baby had never been born.

When I came back after
my second pregnancy, one dear colleague said: “You’re doing a brilliant
job. It’s just as if you never had the twins.”

No one could
pretend that my situation bore any comparison to that of a girl packed
off to a laundry after her baby was put up for adoption.

But I do
believe there is a relic of the fear which made us incarcerate troubling
women in the way we deal, even today, with mothers.

Thankfully we now pay single mothers benefit. But how often do you hear
anyone saying how hard it is to raise a child on your own and how
important that work is? No, all we hear about is how to cut the benefit
of “freeloaders”.

And those 4,000-plus Irish women who go to
the UK every year for abortions.

How many of them would make that choice
if they lived in a society which genuinely welcomed and supported new
mothers, whatever their circumstances?

Apologising to the
Magdalene survivors on the part of the State will require an
embarrassing U-turn. But saying sorry as a society will be much harder.

We will have to show we feel it.

And that will mean learning to love
women’s sexuality, including the motherhood that for most women is part
of it.